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Figured Out How New Yahoo! Movies Site Works

The good news: We’ve figured out how the new Yahoo! Movies site works.
The bad news: Not everything is rosy.

The biggest difference is the new HD trailers are encoded in MP4 instead of MOV. I actually prefer MP4, but the biggest issue is the quality has severely dropped. We typically encode 1080p @ 10Mbps. The new Yahoo! 1080p MP4 encodes are at 4Mbps, less than half the original quality of the old MOVs. This is almost if not as bad as YouTube encodes, and YouTube encodes aren’t watermarked. It saddens me Yahoo! has taken this path.

Another problem is Yahoo! trailers/clips aren’t always associated with a movie. For example, a new trailer they released yesterday was for Cirkus Columbia. If you tried to search for that movie, it’s not even listed in their database.

We weren’t able to automate posting new Yahoo! trailers that didn’t have a movie associated with it. Those will be done manually for now, which means delays.

As for instructions on how to find the download links for Yahoo! trailers on its new site, I’ll be updating our Download from Yahoo! tutorial when I have some free time. The process is a lot more complicated than before, so it may take some time before I publish it.

Update: I’ve posted a rough draft of the new instructions. If you have any questions regarding the instructions, feel free to ask in the comments below.